Home entertainment systems comprised of plural appliances and/or the controlling devices used to issue commands to such appliances may be provisioned with devices for detecting user presence and/or user interaction via methods such as gesture, spoken voice, facial recognition, spatial analysis, etc., as known in the art. Furthermore, growing use of personal communication devices such as smart phones, tablet computers, etc., may provide additional means for identification of user presence via detection of such personal communication devices on a local wireless network such as a WiFi network, a Bluetooth network, etc. While multiple media sources and multiple media rendering devices may be coupled in many of these home entertainment systems through a central routing appliance such as an AV receiver, set top box, smart TV, etc., no systems or methods currently exist for using user presence and/or user interaction detection alone or in conjunction with a central routing appliance to provide enhanced home entertainment system functionalities.